![The Place of Knowing](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
![The Place of Knowing](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Knowing is a process, not an arrival. The Place of Knowing: A Spiritual Autobiography celebrates the spiritual-both seen and unseen-through the life of acclaimed writer and devout Mormon Emma Lou Warner Thayne.
In this insightful, eloquently written memoir, Emma Lou-author of thirteen books of poetry, essays, and fiction-shares poignant personal anecdotes that begin with a terrifying near-death experience when, without warning, a six-pound iron rod smashed through a car windshield into her face. As she narrates her journey through her recovery process, she reflects on previous life experiences-from the daily to the sublime. Through both example and insight, she shares adventures while offering a calming presence for those who may fear death, yearn to know how to celebrate life, and crave direction on how to access the wonders of the divine.
For anyone who has wondered about life after death or who desires a better understanding of his or her divine self, The Place of Knowing will inspire spiritual seekers everywhere to reach out in friendship to others and to embrace new experiences-ultimately discovering themselves in the process.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781936236916 |
---|---|
Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
Publication date: | 12/29/2011 |
Pages: | 272 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.61(d) |
Read an Excerpt
JOURNEY TO THE PLACE OF KNOWING
[A]n exaltation of joy ... even more beautiful than anything in a dream.
-Madeleine L'Engle
Things happen. Early in the world you travel into them. One day
You rise without prayer in a far camp and silently hurry away.
Having slept under stars and still breathing the greyed fire,
Who would take time to suppose this the middle of a lifetime?
To you nothing here is immediate, crucial, in the least attractive.
No expecting beyond hours of X-rays, stitches, shots, ice.
All that time returning, you vague about familiar hands, Tangled in your head, the blow to trace, surely someone else's story. Because of the swelling, Dr. Morales could not operate that day. All he could do was stitch me up and wait until ice and rest could reduce the purple protrusion by my eye and over my temple. I agreed with Jim, almost without thought, not to let our family, who was still camping, know about the accident. What good? They'd be back in the afternoon, driving without having to worry about me. Despite my serious condition, Jim, my closest advisor, knew I would want to be home to wait out my time before surgery. He knew how critical the familiar would be to my recovery from trauma. He took us via my own eye doctor who, with the caring expertise I was used to, gently removed the final shards of glass. I never cried. I was not afraid. I felt nothing, not even great pain. Someone else occupied my skin. Five hours later, Mel came into our bedroom not knowing what had happened, only that there had been an accident. I lie on a treasured pillow in some dim region, wanting nothing. His hand went to his mouth and he sobbed. Until then I had no idea of how I looked. Jim had told Rinda at the door. She came to the bed and, like Becky, took my hand and said, "You'll be OK, Mother." Then she and Becky called my brothers and friends to say that I'd had a small accident. One by one they came to me, bringing their individual looks of veiled dismay. Jim took a picture of me lying there with the rusted iron rod beside me, as long from my head to my hips. He also took a picture of the smashed slit in the windshield, crackles around it, looking like a great glass eye peering into and out of the passenger seat of the car. Two days later I scrawled in the journal I could not read: "All I've been saying since 7:30 Sat. morning is 'thank you. Thank you. Another chance, Lulie, take it & run!'" Surgery came four days after the accident, scheduled in a rush before the Fourth of July weekend when Dr. Morales would be out of town. He asked for a picture of the right side of my face before the injury. He would restore me, but to what? Would that it could be Ingrid Bergman? But then again, how I might look seemed almost incidental to how much I wanted my eye back for seeing, or my brain for thinking. My doctor brother, Homer, had long ago explained to me that in a concussion the brain is like an egg in a tea cup. With a blow the cup can appear intact even though the egg has been shattered. I wanted my shattered head back in one piece. I had always looked for divine help through my faith in healing-in anything actually-whether taking an exam or talking to someone in trouble. But this situation seemed different. Words and ideas were lost in a fog of no feeling. Prayer had always been as natural as breathing, but I felt separated even from that. Mother and Father led us in blessings on our food and entreaties for help, even to play our best in a game or tournament. As adults, when we were flying as my three brothers and I often were, Mother was "working on the weather," and we all had stories of miraculous breaking up of storms. In 1924, my father had stood in a circle of priesthood bearers in front of the congregation I was born into to give me a name and a blessing when I was a month old. That event is recorded in the cornerstone of the then new Highland Park Ward, where I was the first baby to be christened. I can remember still, when I was four and had both measles and whooping cough long before medicines to cure either. In our front window were signs alerting others to the highly contagious diseases in our home. I must have been dangerously ill. It was time for a blessing. I can still feel the kitchen stool I sat on in front of the radiator in the living room to stay warm. My father and an adored uncle put their big hands on my head. They felt like a heavy capful of magic. My scalp still raises thinking about it. I heard my father's voice being very serious, and he was crying-most of the time he laughed with us so I felt his seriousness down my neck and into my shoulders. I had no reason to wonder why Mother and Grandma were not part of the blessing. I remember being carried by my father back upstairs to the bed I shared with my grandmother, expecting for sure to be back in first grade the next day where the school nurse would take my temperature and let me stay. Only the blessing part is still clear, but I know I didn't miss enough school not to be promoted. Blessings had helped, I was sure. The year before I was married I asked for a blessing before having my broken back set. I had gone over a cliff on the ski hill and landed in a pine tree. Later, blessings had been imperative before the birth of my five babies. Once Mel and I even stopped off on the way to the hospital with our fourth daughter to have a special laying on of hands for me by my Apostle uncle, accustomed to assurance that the power of his office would make the blessing even more effective. Seventeen years and many blessings after my accident on the ski hill, when I was playing tennis doubles, I'd been hit in the "karate spot" at the back of my neck with a hard serve. I dropped like a rock in a puddle. Men had picked me up and spread me on a narrow bench to carry me up to the clubhouse for help. I felt myself slipping off the bench, but I could not move or speak. We made the top just before I would have fallen off. Homer came, took me home to bed, and called a neurologist. My speech and movement came back but not my sight. Tests the next day in the hospital and a devastating headache suggested a blood clot on my brain. Surgery was scheduled. That night my brothers and Mel gave me a blessing. I was a forty-one-year-old woman with five children at home. During the blessing I joined in, asked urgently for healing. My headache disappeared. I begged for postponement of the surgery, for a new assessment. Tests the next day showed a clearing of my head. The only residual of the blow was double vision. For two months I wore a black patch over my right eye to let me see normally. Not all well-intended blessings were as immediately effective. In the three-and-a-half-year struggle of our daughter Becky's severe bout with manic depression and bulimia, blessings and prayers joined with professional treatment and medication. But in 1970, the stigma of mental illness went hand-in-hand with ancient interpretation. One well-meaning comforter wanted to bless Becky to be rid of the demons that afflicted her. We refused. Never was there a more bleak time for the whole family. Becky did get well, as much because of love as of treatment and faith. Why wasn't a blessing the first thing I thought of at home in bed after the accident? It never even occurred to me to want to bring even that into the vacancy that filled me. Everything in me was on hold. Only six weeks before, Mel and we who loved him, had found comfort in love and the laying on of hands by his bishop and brothers-in-law. Triple bypass surgery was still a major operation, and we were counting on help from the Divine. But we had learned since childhood that along with prayers for healing came "Thy will be done" and a hope for peace in the outcome. Now, the night before the surgery on my face and head, I did ask two brothers, together with Mel, to give me a priesthood blessing. When they put their hands on my head after anointing my forehead with consecrated oil, I remembered how their hands had always before, so many times in my life, been lovingly efficacious. Now they felt like a ton of weight on my scalp-as if my neck could not support them-but also as if they were handling the pain. I thought if they could draw it up in their hands they could pull it off my shoulders, off my whole head, and I would simply float off to where I needed to be, no struggle, no effort at all, just a void of absolute quiet. During the blessing I silently pled for an escape. I had yet to learn where the accident had taken me. At 6:20 a.m. the next morning, waiting for surgery, I felt only anticipatory anxiety. I wished desperately for a forbidden drink of water to wash away the taste of blood that continued to coagulate as it ran down my throat from damaged sinuses. "And it will get worse," Dr. Morales said. "You'll bleed through your nose too. Both eyes will be swollen and black." Lifelong writer that I am, I had taken my journal to the hospital with me.
Table of Contents
DEDICATIONACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 Journey to the Place of Knowing
CHAPTER 2 Pillars and Stars-To Know and Tell
CHAPTER 3 Reverence for Life-From Birth to Death and Beyond
CHAPTER 4 Living with the Ineffable-In Sleep, Solitude, and Serenity
CHAPTER 5 Language of the Heart
CHAPTER 6 Subtle Destiny
CHAPTER 7 Where Can I Turn for Peace?
CHAPTER 8 Stations of the Cross
CHAPTER 9 Healers
CHAPTER 10 The Ineffable Shared
CHAPTER 11 On Paying Attention
EPILOGUE